I sat down this afternoon and finally made up a list of all the things I really need to get done before Thanksgiving. Top on the list, of course, is doing all the Thanksgiving day shopping. I've already sent out reminder emails to my mom and my older sister and come up with a few dozen more frantic reasons to contact them and say "oh, and can I also borrow…" I am woefully unprepared for large dinner parties. I have enough dishes and silverware (at least I'm pretty sure I do. Add to list: count plates and forks) but we're going to have to borrow some more glasses because our current collection is a bit eclectic - a few glass glasses and then some of those funky retro metallic glasses and the usual assortment of cheap plastic cups you can get four for a dollar at the local drug store on sale days. I may have graduated from college eons ago, but sometimes, looking at our possessions, I think I never left. The list also includes a few work-related things (since we'll be heading off again for another week on the road in less than a week), cleaning the house, and getting my hair cut because now that I finally noticed that my head seems to be covered entirely with split ends, it's been driving me crazy.

We slept late today. In fact I think we're making a concerted effort to not only sleep late every day this week, but to also lurk in bed as long as is humanly possible. Having the wireless network is probably not quite conducive to making us drag our lazy butts out of bed and get things done. Eventually we got up in time to get dressed and meet my mom for lunch. In our defense, lunch was at 11 so it wasn't like we were lazing around in bed *all* day. At lunch my mom gave me a huge box of wedding pictures for me to go through. It's a good thing I'm such a lazy slob that I haven't even finished putting together the wedding album yet, now that I have potentially more pictures to add to the stack. This little project is going on the short (well, it'll stay short if I can help it) list of things I need to do in December, when we return from our next stint at training mollusk handlers by the sea, but in the meantime, I've got to sort through all these pictures and see if there's any I want and then give them back to my mom so she can pass the box on to the next person.

After lunch we went home for the express purpose of dragging the dining room table out of the dining room just to prove that yes it really would fit through the doorway. I've been saying for weeks it will but (Richard, don't read this next part!) lately I was starting to worry that maybe I was being too optimistic. Luckily it fits, and we did ponder simply leaving it in the hallway (and therefore blocking the front door) til Thanksgiving but decided that might not be the wisest plan. Although I'm thinking that making our families climb through the living room window to get in might be at least vaguely amusing.

Then, after we determined that my marvelous plan for rearranging *all* the furniture downstairs in order to get all 17 of us into one room for the big turkey feast will work, we headed off to the theater so I could drool over Pierce Brosnan in skin-tight scuba gear, and also fencing (mmm! Hunk with sword!) and Richard could drool over Halle Berry in slinky dresses. Die Another Day was appropriately cheesy. I decided that the one fact I would quibble over was the fact that there was no way they could actually *start* a helicopter in freefall, let alone 400 feet from the ground. I'm just pretending that all the other improbable stuff was real. I mean, I'm willing to forget a lot just to see Pierce Brosnan in action since he tops my List (of people I'm allowed to sleep with and my spouse cannot complain). I'm not sure where Halle Berry falls on Richard's List, but he seemed pretty happy with the movie too, even though she didn’t do any fencing. Oh, and we also decided that the next car we get is going to have rocket launchers in the trunk and will turn invisible, just because it would be that cool.

We picked out our turkey today, a process which involved us standing in front of the freezer cases and poking through all the plastic wrapped bundles to find one that was the right size for a good 15 minutes. We've got a 20-pound bird in our refrigerator now. I am hoping very much that this is large enough for the group (considering that there's really only 12 people who are actually eating the bird), and I already warned my youngest sister-in-law that her parents have no choice - everyone will go home with leftovers if I have to sneak out the back and hide it in their cars myself. I did have a ditz moment when we both dithered (well okay, mainly it was me doing the dithering) over whether the turkey would be okay in the fridge for the next few days. I finally made myself feel better by asking one of the big burly guys behind the meat counter. At least it's not frozen so I don't have to worry about how long it will take to thaw. And for a few days at least I can conveniently forget about the fact that on Thursday I'm going to have to reach my hand into the cold, slimy rear end of a dead turkey and pull out a neatly wrapped bag of guts.